As a philosopher of science, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) focused on
human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften, a term that had gained currency
in German culture. These sciences underwent a so-called crisis of
foundations (Grundlagenkrise) (Lessing 1984:132-136) during
Dilthey's formative years in the second half of the nineteenth
century. In Germany, human sciences had evolved into sciences mainly
within the framework of the concept of scientificalness
(Wissenschaftlichkeit) of German Idealism. However, during the first
half of the nineteenth century the human sciences had developed into
empirical research sciences, which made it impossible for them to
understand their own nature by means of the concept of scientificalness
that had formed the basis for their development into academic
disciplines (Schnadelbach 1991:108-117). On the other hand, a sound
methodological research apparatus had been elaborated over the years
within the various human science disciplines, to which they could resort
in their ambitions to offer genuinely scientific knowledge of areas that
until then had been studied basically from the metaphysical point of
view of German Idealism. In these circumstances, Dilthey saw a new role
for philosophy, the status of which as an academic discipline had become
somewhat unstable in the post-metaphysical era. This role consisted in
providing the existing research methodology of contemporary human
sciences with the philosophical-epistemological foundation that it still
lacked.

As a negative consequence of the above-mentioned lack, he points
out the groundlessness of the validity pretensions of knowledge as the
human sciences view it, which undermines their inherent aspiration to
provide rules for the optimal management of social life. It is
especially characteristic of Dilthey's reasoning that the solution
of these two tasks coincides, as he sees it: the very substantiation of
the objectivity of the research results of human sciences would
guarantee the ability of these sciences to react back on life and
society (Dilthey 2002:159).

Thus we could say that Dilthey's deliberations of the
objectivity of scientific knowledge are motivated by two aspirations. On
the one hand, to form an adequate self-understanding for the human
sciences of themselves as legitimate members of the scientific
community. On the other hand, to motivate the pretensions of human
sciences to become the instrument of consciously shaping the social
life.

In its endeavours to elaborate the epistemology of scientific
knowledge, German philosophy relied on the national tradition,
especially on the philosophical legacy of Immanuel Kant. "Back to
Kant" became the catchword for a number of diverse philosophical
quests in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany. Dilthey,
too, was influenced by this movement, as the very ambitious name that he
gave to his epistemological aspirations testifies. Thus he set out to
create "the critique of historical reason", i.e. to complete
in the philosophy of human sciences something analogous to what he
thought Kant had achieved within the framework of his critique of reason
in elaborating the epistemological foundations of natural sciences.

In accordance with the general Kantian views, Dilthey proceeds in
his philosophy from the analysis of consciousness, attributing a major
role to the synthetic activeness of human spirit in the formation of
human world view, just like Kant had done before him. Likewise, he
adopts in general lines Kant's idea of the objectivity of
scientific knowledge, according to which the latter consists in the
strictly general and inevitable validity of knowledge about experienced
reality. In Dilthey's opinion, Kant had managed to present
convincingly the conditions of the possibility of the objectivity of
cognition in natural sciences. At the same time he was positive that it
was not possible to treat cognition in human sciences in an adequate
manner by proceeding from the conditions that Kant had delineated in the
area of natural sciences. This, in its turn, induces Dilthey to modify
Kant's transcendentalism on a large scale. In the course of this
process, the concept of objectivity also undergoes a certain change.
Kant regarded the general and inevitable relations between natural
phenomena as objects of objective knowledge. From the point of view of
human sciences, which emerged after Kant's days, unique phenomena,
too, were considered to be legitimate objects of research. In fact,
Dilthey regarded unique cultural phenomena as the most significant field
of research of this branch of science. Thus we could conclude that
objective knowledge in human sciences should also contain the
universally valid knowledge of unique objects.

By and large, Dilthey's treatment of objectivity seems to have
two focuses. In his earlier creative period, the grounding of the
objectivity of human sciences consists in the demonstration of the fact
that the ambition of these sciences to grasp reality is justified. In
his later phase, however, he focuses on substantiating the universal
validity of cognitive achievements in the domain of human sciences. I
shall take a closer look at the respective approaches in the two
subsequent parts of the present article.

2. Objectivity as correspondence to reality

Dilthey's epistemological analysis proceeds from one
fundamental principle. He calls this the principle of phenomenality
(Satz der Phanomenalitat): "The supreme principle of philosophy is
the principle of phenomenality: according to this principle everything
that exists for me is subject to the condition that it is a fact of my
consciousness. All outer things, too, are only given as a connection of
facts or processes of the consciousness. Objects, things, only exist
for, and in, consciousness" (Dilthey 1974a:90). This principle
stresses the point that whenever man experiences something, on the most
elementary level, it is a fact of his consciousness, although the
non-philosophical mind is not aware of this. The term "facts of
consciousness" emphasizes the significance of this principle in
Dilthey's philosophical analysis as pointing to a special domain of
facts. The science, therefore, that should deal with the given domain of
facts, is philosophy as the universal empirical discipline. It does rely
on a specific mode of experience, but experience nevertheless, and this
should guarantee philosophy a respectable status among other empirical
sciences.

According to Dilthey, the principle of phenomenality is the only
reliable point of departure for philosophy primarily due to the fact
that if there is reason at all to state that something exists, it is
only in this way and inasmuch as it is a fact of consciousness. Dilthey
understands philosophy, first and foremost, as "a guide for
methodically grasping reality, the real world in pure experience, and
for analyzing it within the limits prescribed by the critique of
knowledge" (Dilthey 1989:173). Thus the principle of phenomenality,
according to Dilthey's intention, should serve as a point of
departure for moving towards the solution of the central problem of his
epistemology--to ground the pretension of scientific knowledge,
especially that of the human science knowledge, to capture reality.

The concept condensed in the principle of phenomenality has also
its critical side--Dilthey applies it to his critique of metaphysics.
The very essence of metaphysics, he argues, lies in the attempts to find
behind the facts of consciousness something that would allow one to
deduce the facts of consciousness, and this way to explain them by means
of purely intellectual apprehension. The principle of phenomenality,
therefore, indicates the limit of reasonable cognitive pretension which,
as Dilthey saw it, had been uncritically crossed by traditional
metaphysics. Dilthey also views Kant's concept of Ding an sich as a
metaphysical relic, by which the founder of transcendental philosophy
betrayed his own critical method.

Dilthey calls the specific mode of experience, by which we become
aware of what exists for us as a fact of consciousness, Innewerden, or
reflexive awareness. By this term he denotes the primordial unity of
consciousness. Dilthey argues that Innewerden as the most simple
modality of consciousness precedes the division of subject and object,
of form and content, and of act and content, by means of which the
structure of consciousness was commonly described. This is a
groundbreaking subject-object-identity. For this reason, Dilthey
believes that the reflexive awareness of facts of consciousness on the
given level is characterized by the highest degree of immediacy and
certainty.

When viewed from the genealogical aspect, Dilthey treats Innewerden
as "the most simple form in which psychic life can appear"
(Dilthey 1989:254). The unity of consciousness that becomes aware in
Innewerden remains in the sphere of consciousness that precedes the
explicit self-consciousness. Accordingly, there is no self-consciousness
as yet in Innewerden, it being primary in genealogical terms, that would
clearly differentiate itself from the consciousness of outer reality.
Nevertheless, it could still be called "pre-intentional"
(Makkreel 1992), inasmuch Innewerden is related to the world even when
the world has not been conceived as object as yet. The evolution of
consciousness consists in the formation of a distinct
self-consciousness, and of the consciousness of the world that is
related to it.

Therefore, consciousness should be regarded as the nexus of life.
The concept of "life", central to Dilthey's theorizing,
denotes the continuous self-domination, consisting of actions and
reactions, between the "self" and the natural and social
world, and the resultant experience. The term "lived
experience" (Erlebnis) thus designates the particular experienced
conflict between action and reaction at a given moment of time.

The lived experience is the smallest indivisible meaningful
phenomenon of life. It represents an internally divided totality, the
structure of which always contains the connection of cognitive,
emotional and volitional processes. Dilthey's main critique of the
earlier philosophy of consciousness, including that of Kant, is that it
reduces the human experience exclusively to its cognitive aspect. This,
he argues, does not allow us to explicate the human experience of the
outer world adequately. Our selfhood is at the same time always a lived
experience of the world in which we live, so that the lived experience
of the world is simultaneously the experience of our world. Yet there is
still no subject-object or inner world-outer world dichotomy in this
lived experience. In the light of the aforesaid, we can conclude that
the term "lived experience" for Dilthey does not signify man's inner emotional state but his openness to the reality of life
and his immediate awareness of this. From the epistemological
perspective, then, it is significant at this point that Dilthey
considers this lived experience as immediately present and
unquestionably given to man, and therefore as certain.

From this concept of presupposed certainty, Dilthey hopes to deduce
the foundation for the certainty of contentions elaborated in the
research works of special sciences. In this context, then, philosophy as
the science of the facts of consciousness should, for this reason,
become a universal science of foundation in relation to special
sciences. He sees it as his primary task to analyse the relations of the
facts of consciousness, and to present as integral a description of
these as possible. The arguments made in various natural and human
scientific disciplines should be ultimately verified by tracing them
back to this connection of facts of consciousness. Johannes Romelt calls
that kind of verification plan the two-layered model of knowledge.
According to Dilthey, any knowledge can stem from experience only. But
experience itself is divided into two layers. The fundamental layer of
experience consists of facts of consciousness captured in Innewerden and
lived experience immediately, and therefore unmistakably. The derived
layer of experience is formed by the observation results of empirical
special sciences, which might be erroneous and, being in principle open
to correction, require verification on the fundamental level of
experience (Romelt 1999:185-186).

Such substantiation of scientific knowledge faces major
difficulties. The latter have been thoroughly analysed in various
scholarly writings (e.g. Ineichen 1975, 1991, Romelt 1999). The scope of
the present article, however, does not allow us to take a closer look at
them. It should be mentioned in this connection, though, that Dilthey
himself was aware of a major drawback in the treatment of the problem.
Namely, he was forced to admit that the lived experience of the world
that had a central role to play in his epistemology, was inevitably
related to the situation and perspective of a definite person. This,
however, endangers the attainment of the other aspect of
objectivity--universal validity--by such strategy of substantiation.

3. Objectivity as universal validity

The topic of the universal validity of cognition in human sciences
is therefore becoming ever more prominent in the late period of his
work. On the one hand, he does emphasize the circumstance that objective
knowledge in human sciences has a different sense than it has in natural
sciences: "The objectivity of knowledge that is sought here has a
different sense; the methods for approaching the ideal of objectivity of
knowledge here display essential differences from those by which we
approach the conceptual cognition of nature" (Dilthey 2002a:92). On
the other hand, the very ability of human sciences to exert influence on
the management of social life depends, in his opinion, on the universal
validity of the results of human sciences. He regards such ability as
essentially characteristic of these sciences (De Mul 2004:259-260).

Under the influence of these considerations, his treatment of human
sciences undergoes a certain change in the form of a shift in some
significant accents in the late period of his work. Besides the concepts
of life and lived experience that until then had been at the very core
of his treatment, the emphasis on the role of understanding in the
constitution of the cognitive relation, characteristic of human
sciences, becomes more prominent. In his work that appeared in 1910,
"The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences",
Dilthey characterizes these sciences as follows: "A discipline
belongs to the human sciences only if its object is accessible to us
through the attitude that is founded upon the nexus of life, expression,
and understanding" (Dilthey 2002b:109). Dilthey formulated the
definition of understanding, which proved to be groundbreaking
throughout the late period of his work, in his article that was
published in 1900, "The Rise of Hermeneutics": "Thus we
call understanding a process, in which we perceive this psychic course
of life on the basis of the sensuously given signs that are the
expression of it" (Dilthey 1974b:318). The cited definition
stresses the fact that the mediation of perception by means of signs
given in outer experience is essential to understanding. Alongside the
term "sensuously given signs", Dilthey uses in his later texts
synonymous expressions like sensuously perceived "expressions of
life" (Lebensausserungen), and "expressions" (Ausdrucke).

He concedes in the abovementioned article that the lived experience
alone as a basis of cognition is not sufficient enough to guarantee the
objectivity of knowledge. Even if we assume that the lived experience
renders the experience of reality that proceeds from it immediate
certainty, the latter would still involve only the particular person
alone. How would one advance from that kind of certainty to the
universally valid cognition of experience? It is in this connection that
Dilthey emphasizes the fact that objective cognition must be based on
something external, continuously fixed, and thus intersubjectively
accessible to examination. According to his new apprehension, this is
the function of the expressions mediated by the external experience of
human action. This is what cognition in human sciences is all about--the
methodical-critical understanding or interpretation.

In his work mentioned above, "The Formation of the Historical
World in the Human Sciences", Dilthey adds an important
specification to his notion of understanding. Having defined
understanding as a process in which we apprehend this psychic course of
life on the basis of the sensuously given expressions of life, he
stresses the autonomy of the domain of spiritual objects in relation to
the psychic processes more explicitly than in his earlier texts:
"Here it is a common error to resort to the psychic course of
life--psychology--to account for our knowledge of this inner
aspect." (Dilthey 2002b:106). The understanding of that spirit is
not psychological cognition. It is a regression to a spiritual formation
that has its own structure and lawfulness. The object of understanding
is not so much the inner processes of the author but the nexus, which,
having been created by the author, then becomes independent (Dilthey
2002b:107). He now describes the understanding of the spiritual
formation in human sciences in terms of understanding the meanings of
expressions of life. Although these meanings are formed through the
psychic life of individuals, they are not identical to those. Whereas
the psychic life of the one that creates the meanings is not (at least
in its entirety) intersubjectively reproducible, and cannot therefore be
the object of universally valid knowledge, in the case of meanings such
cognition is possible.

Dilthey delineates the culture-creating activeness of mankind in
the same work as the all-encompassing "objectification" or
"objectification of life" (Dilthey 2002b: 168). By
objectification he means, on the one hand, the externalization of human
productivity, its becoming intersubjectively accessible, but on the
other hand, its representation in the human "sphere of
commonality" and "universality". He denotes the latter by
a term he has borrowed from Hegel, "objective spirit". The
common mentality of the society is expressed and accumulated in the
objectifications of life. Wishing also to distance himself from Hegel as
a metaphysician, Dilthey stresses the point that his concept of life is
broader than his predecessor's concept of spirit, encompassing
besides the universal and the rational the singular and the irrational
as well.

Life and spirit manifest themselves both in the material products
of human activity and in the institutional forms of society, its culture
systems and external organization. All these together form "this
great outer reality of human spirit" (Dilthey 2002b:168) that
surrounds us everywhere. The objectifications of life open up the access
to life's historical dimension through understanding, since the
heritage of the earlier eras of human commonality is ever present in the
form of objectifications. This heritage, had it remained just a
phenomenon of individual spiritual life, would have been lost for the
next generations. Thus the individual lives in the historically formed
world and actualizes constantly the historical experience of the given
human society, while partaking of the fixed spirit through the
objectifications of life. Hence the historically universal spirituality,
the "objective spirit", manifests itself in the
objectifications of life. This spirit, as Dilthey now emphasizes, cannot
be psychologically perceived. It is by this term that he specifies
further the concept of human sciences--"everything in which human
spirit has objectified itself falls within the scope of the human
sciences" (Dilthey 2002b:170).

Dilthey characterizes the inner structure of the objective spirit
as a complex of productive nexuses (Wirkungszusammenhange). The notion
of productive nexuses refers to the connection of certain concepts,
value assessments and aims, that serves as a basis for creating specific
good. Such connections are characterized by historical development,
during which process they acquire an ever more differentiated inner
structure on the one hand, while on the other hand they are also subject
to change, forming new values and altering, accordingly, the aims to be
reached. The agents of the productive nexuses are, first and foremost,
individuals, but also most diverse human associations that have been
formed on the basis of common values for the purpose of creating good.

It is in the sphere of influence of the productive nexuses that the
personality of man is formed. Men are, in fact, the "points of
intersection" of productive nexuses (Dilthey 2002b:176). The
objective spirit forms human subjectivity through them. This holds true
for man as the subject of cognition as well. Following Kant's
views, Dilthey regards the basic structures of the synthesizing action
of the cognizing subject as the condition of the possibility of
scientific knowledge. At the same time, he rejects Kant's theory of
the timeless transcendental subject. He has replaced it with the concept
of the empirical-historical subject, the basic structures of the action
of which are socio-culturally moulded and subject to historical change.
Dilthey calls such basic structures of the subject's synthesizing
activeness the categories of life. He points out that in contrast to
Kant's formal categories, which in Dilthey's view are deduced
from the kind of thinking that is separate from the original nexus of
life, the life categories evolve along the basic lines of the
human-historical-social life, and for this reason form the constituents
of the apprehension process of such life. Because of the significance of
these for the comprehension of life objectification in human sciences,
he singles out such categories as meaning and sense, part and whole,
temporality, connection, structure, value, aim, development, and also
essence.

At the same time, Dilthey seems to be of the opinion that the
possibility of objectivity towards which the cognition of human science
strives for is, above all, associated with the qualities of the object
that is being interpreted, rather than with the structure of the subject
of cognition. As mentioned before, it must be continuously and
accessibly fixed for the external experience, which makes it possible to
subject it to long-time intersubjectively controlled examination. The
various ways of fixation, however, are not equal in this function for
Dilthey. In a posthumously published manuscript he divides the various
expressions of life into three groups: (1) concepts, judgements and
larger thought formations; (2) actions, and (3) expressions of lived
experience (Dilthey 2002c:226-227). In the analysis that follows, he
regards these expressions of life as important for human sciences on the
basis of the extent to which they open up the integral life nexus that
is ultimately the foundation of them all. Since the most complete access
to the latter can be obtained through the understanding of the
expressions of lived experience, Dilthey centres his analysis on the
understanding that corresponds to this particular type of expressions.
He attaches next to no importance to the type of understanding that
corresponds to the first group of expressions, for this kind of
expressions "have been detached from the lived experience in which
they arose" (Dilthey 2002c:225). He pays more attention to the type
of understanding that corresponds to the second group of expressions,
since in these the inner essence of selfhood is at least partly
expressed. However, as mentioned before, he singles out the expressions
of lived experience as the most multifarious manifestation of the nexus
of life. Yet even these, he argues, can be unreliable as sources of
objective understanding, for such expressions could also be feigned, and
therefore misleading. A possibility like that is in Dilthey's
opinion excluded, though, in the case of one category

of expressions of lived experience--namely, that of artistic,
religious or philosophical creativity. Among these, he in particular
stresses the role of written expressions of lived experience as the
basis of objective knowledge: "Since it is only in language that
the life of mind and spirit finds its complete and exhaustive
expression--one that makes objective comprehension possible--exegesis
culminates in the interpretation of the written records of human
existence. This art is the basis of philology. The science of this art
is hermeneutics" (Dilthey 2002c:237-238).

Since Dilthey attributes to language the privileged status of
understanding life expression, in his view, then, the comprehension of
language is the "archetypal" form of any understanding. He
specifies the process of comprehending a linguistic expression as
"determining the indeterminate". Single isolated words have
several "determinate-indeterminate" meanings (Bedeutungen)
(Dilthey 2002c:241). They acquire a definite meaning only in the
relations within the sentence. The combination of single word meanings
in a definite sentence yields the sense of the latter. Thus the
understanding of a language is primarily the comprehension of meanings
and sense. Meaning and sense are the fundamental categories of
Dilthey's conception of understanding and interpretation.

Since word meanings relate to the sense of the sentence as parts to
the whole, the understanding is characterized from the beginning as the
connection of two basic operations: the whole should be understood
through its component parts and the component parts through the whole.
Such circular relation occurs in the very understanding of the sentence,
but it becomes even more prominent in the interpretation of integral
written texts. What we have here is the circular interdependence,
repeatedly described in the history of hermeneutics, which is
characteristic of understanding the text. Part and whole form the other
groundbreaking pair of categories in Dilthey's hermeneutical
philosophy.

Next Dilthey proceeds from the prerequisite that the categories
mentioned in connection with understanding language are applicable to
the interpretation of life objectification in general. "Just as
words have a meaning by which they designate something, and sentences
have a sense that we construe, so we can construe the connectedness of
life from the determinate-indeterminate meaning of its parts. Meaning is
the special relation that parts have to the whole within life. We
recognize this meaning, as we do that of the words in a sentence, by
virtue of memories and future possibilities. The essence of meaning
relations lies in the shaping of a life-course over time on the basis of
life-structure as conditioned by a milieu" (Dilthey 2002c:253-254).
A single expression of life has meaning when it stands as a sign in the
referential relation to something that differs from it. This is why we
cannot, within the framework of the given system of concepts, speak
about the meaning of life in general--in Dilthey's philosophy, life
is the final irreducible reality that cannot, for this reason, refer to
anything different from itself. The apprehension of life as a whole lies
in understanding its sense, which is formed of the encompassing
relationship of its meaningful component parts. Since life, according to
Dilthey, is given to man in his lived experiences, the structural
connection of lived experiences is constituted by sense. Thus, meaning
is the fundamental category of understanding lived experience. Lived
experience attains unity by its meaning.

Human sciences, as Dilthey sees it, should on the one hand aspire towards the analysis of the structures of meaning of the "objective
spirit" entailed in the social-historical world. On the other hand,
though, they should aim at connecting the single expressions of lived
experiences to particular larger structures of meanings. Thus the
process of understanding in human sciences is characterized by two-way
movement: it tries to integrate the meaningful separate aspects into the
unity of sense and, at the same time, to reconstruct the unity of sense
by taking into account the meanings of its constituent parts. In order
to attain the general validity of understanding, both these directions
of apprehension function in the reciprocally complementary and
corrective manner. The cognition of social-historical individualities
lies, on the one hand, in the treatment of the latter as products of
structures of meanings and of productive nexuses, and, on the other
hand, as the agents of further development of these productive nexuses
themselves.

The total nexus of all these meaningful constituent areas is the
nexus of life, which is accessible through the understanding of single
expressions of lived experience. Life in its course is in Dilthey's
view a succession of lived experiences, the meanings of which are
subject to change until the end of life. But in contrast to individual
lives lived in the past, the historical life has never ended, and for
this reason one can assume that the expressions of lived experience
fixed in objectification will keep joining to ever new wholes as
totalities of sense and constellations of meaning. This circumstance,
however, questions the very aspiration of human sciences to attain the
universal validity of the knowledge of the meanings and sense of life
objectification.

Dilthey seems to have found a solution to this problem in the
treatment of larger productive nexuses centred in themselves as wholes.
He considers nations and historical periods as examples of such
productive nexuses. In Dilthey's view, the latter are characterized
by a more intense inner intercourse in comparison with other productive
nexuses, and also by a stronger reluctance towards any possible
influences from the outside. If they do receive influences from the
outside world, these will be assimilated into the structures of meaning
of the era or nation itself. At the centre of such structure, Dilthey
argues, is the nexus of the dominant world view, value assessments and
set goals. In relation to this nexus as the whole, all other life
objectifications within the horizon of the given productive nexus
acquire significance as parts of this whole. The research of human
sciences must place itself into this kind of wholes and describe them
immanently. The completeness and self-centeredness of such wholes, the
connections between the involved productive nexuses and the shared
mentality should, according to Dilthey's expectations, enable the
methodically-critically founded descriptions to attain universal
validity (Dilthey 2002b:159-160, 175-187).

4. Objectivity and the social-practical role of human sciences

It is easy to notice the weak points of such substantiation of
objectivity. The limited scope of the present article does not allow us
to present a more detailed analysis of these at this point. I would,
instead, concentrate on the issue of why the founding of the objectivity
of cognition in human sciences as the attainability of the universal
validity of knowledge was important for Dilthey, to begin with. As he
saw it, the ability of the given type of knowledge to exert optimizing
counter influence on social life depended on the objectivity of this
knowledge. This very ability to exert such influence, however, was in
Dilthey's view essential to human sciences as the forms of the
theoretical and practical self-reflection of society. However, it now
appears that the attainability of the objectivity of knowledge depends
on whether the phenomenon under inspection is separated from the life
situation of the investigator in terms of a sufficient historical and
cultural distance. Purportedly, objectivity can be achieved primarily by
adapting oneself to such productive nexuses, but it is fairly
problematic in relation to the perception of the productive nexus in
which one lives.

Thus it appears that Dilthey's theorizing on the objectivity
of human sciences does not yield the desired results. The
human-scientific grounding of objectivity in the sense of the
justification of the perception of reality, towards which these sciences
aspire, questioned the very objectivity of these in the sense of the
universal validity of knowledge. The reasoning that was to justify the
aspirations of human sciences towards universally valid knowledge
undermined the very ability of these sciences to affect contemporary
society.

This might well be the reason why Dilthey has changed his views on
the social-practical role of human sciences in his later works, although
he has not said so in plain words. He now talks about the historical
consciousness created by these as the liberation of man. "The
historical consciousness of the finitude of every historical phenomenon
and of every human or social state, and of the relativity of every kind
of faith, is the final step toward the liberation of human beings"
(Dilthey 2002c:310). But the kind of liberty he speaks about is no
longer associated with social change but with the widening of the scope
of man's horizon of lived experience through the interpretation of
historical and artistic objectifications. By means of such cognition in
human sciences, "human beings who are determined from within can
experience many other kinds of existence through the imagination.
Confined by circumstances, they can nevertheless glimpse exotic beauties
of the world and regions of life beyond their reach. Put generally:
Human beings bound and limited by the reality of life are liberated not
only by art--as has often been claimed--but also by the understanding of
the historical" (Dilthey 2002c:237).

Address:

Andrus Tool

Department of Philosophy

University of Tartu

Lossi 3

50090 Tartu

E-mail: atool@hot.ee

Phone: +372 738 8224

References

De Mul, Jos (2004) The Tragedy of Finitude. Dilthey's
Hermeneutics of Life. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Dilthey, Wilhelm (2002c) "Plan for the Continuation of the
Formation of the Historical World in Human Sciences". In Selected
Works. Vol. 3, pp. 213-311. Wilhelm Dilthey, ed. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.